Theorizing Like a Historian

• In Event: Methodological Issues in Comparative Historical Analysis

Abstract

Historians and social scientists use theories in different but complimentary ways. We typically think of historians as disliking theories as they prefer to be unconstrained when exploring archives. This overlooks the role that theory plays in larger historiographical debates. In those debates, theories serves to re-contextualize existing research in different theoretical frames to, as the lingo has it, problematize existing findings. Such problematization allows historians to identify overlooked causal factors, foreground tacit positionalities of researchers, or reframe existing questions. Historians thus advance knowledge through problematizing where social scientists do so through replications. Such problematizing could play an important role in effort, associate with Judea Pearl, or Bayesian process tracing, to improve causal inferences by engaging in more systematic de-confounding and the drawing of causal arrow diagrams. Historians' problematizing offers useful clues for expanding such de-confounding that this paper explores more fully. The paper pays particular attention to historians' problematizing moves that involve by changing the historical and geographic contexts and thus drawing our attention to the confounding effects of historical and geographic particularities that might have been backgrounded.

Author

• Marcus Kreuzer, Villanova University